I continue to be
involved in Latin America. From 2002 to 2004 I was the Director for
Latin American and Caribbean Relations of the National Council of
Churches of Christ of the USA. Today I am the President of Faith
Partners of the Americas, a non-profit organization dedicated to
deepening relations of solidarity between churches in the US and
faith communities throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. As I
travel in the region there is no place in the hemisphere where the
US is not feared and hated because of our war policies and actions
and for our blatant use of torture and kidnapping to carry out our
policies. The peoples of the region suffered the same for years from
the military dictators that ruled them. But throughout that dark
period the US was, for them, a beacon of hope because of our public
and international defense of human rights. No more. We are clearly
seen as the enemy. And they are painfully puzzled that the American
people don’t do something to stop this.

It is past time for the American people to stand up and say “no
more. These policies do not represent us—this is totally un-American
and we will have no more of it in our name.”

The
priests were arrested while kneeling in prayer halfway up the
driveway to Fort Huachuca in November 2006. Both priests were
charged with trespassing on a military base and resisting orders of
an officer to stop.

In a pre-trial hearing, the priests attempted to introduce evidence
of torture, murder and gross violations of human rights in
Afghanistan, at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and at Guantanamo. The priests
offered investigative reports from the FBI, the US Army, Amnesty
International, Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Social
Responsibility documenting hundreds of incidents of human rights
violations. Despite increasing evidence of the use of torture by US
forces sanctioned by President Bush and others, the federal court in
Tucson refused to allow any evidence of torture, the legality of the
invasion of Iraq, or international law to be a part of the trial.

BushCo
has over 14 more months to sew their demented seeds of destruction
all over the planet. We must all join Congressman Dennis Kucinich
(D-Oh) in his call to remove them from office not only for their
past, but for their future, illegal wars of aggression, possibly
even doing the unthinkable: using a nuclear weapon.

Things really
began to fall apart on Christmas Eve. While drunk, Lucey took two
handmade Iraqi dog tags from around his neck, threw them at his
younger sister, and told her that he felt like a murderer.

He never did
tell his family the whole story of his experience in Iraq, only bits
and pieces. It was horrific enough. He spoke of elderly people
killed as they tried to run from Marines rolling into Nasariya.

He spoke of a
small Iraqi boy, bloody and prone in the dusty street, shot in the
head and the chest and still holding a small, bloodstained American
flag in his hands. He spoke of his horror as an American tank
lumbered down the street, how he had bolted from his own vehicle
and, as gunfire rippled the sand around him, moved the tiny corpse
to the sad sanctuary of a nearby alley.

He spoke of how
he had been ordered to shoot two Iraqi prisoners. He remembered how
he had looked into their eyes and hesitated, watching as they shook
in terror, and thinking of their families. He remembered that an
officer had shouted, "Pull the fucking trigger, Lucey!" He
remembered shooting the soldiers and watching them die. He told his
father that there were "other things" he did not want the family to
know about.

Here's a faith-based initiative that's not on the Bush
Administration's funding wish list: antiwar protest. In
this stirring documentry, filmmaker Anthony Giacchino turns back the
clock to 1971, when some of the most effective resistance to the
Vietnam War came from the Catholic left. Using archival
footage, inerviews, and a rich collection of photographs and audio
recordings, the documentary traces the actions o the Camden 28, a
group of mostly Catholic war resistersas they plotted and destroyed
draft records at a Camden, New Jersey, post office, and the trial
that followed. The film takes surprising twists and turns and
ultimately offers a call for vigorous dissent in the face of war.
"We saw children on fire," says one activist, the Reverend Michael
Doyle. "What do you do when a child is on fire in a war that
was a mistake?...Write a letter?" –Anthony
Kaufman

A Lone Hero

Aglow for the crush of morning commuters, his flaming body was
supposed to be a call to the nation, a symbol of his rage and
discontent with the U.S. war in Iraq.

"Here is the statement I want to make: if I am required to pay for
your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to
finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to
threaten our country," he wrote in his suicide note. "... If one
death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world:
I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the
mayhem and turmoil caused by my country."

It is
clear that the US media moguls would have us believe that the
catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq was a sincere effort to
promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East, gone awry. But we
must remember that everything associated with capitalism is about
marketing: making the people believe that things and events are the
opposite of what they really are, and creating artificial wants that
neither benefit the individual nor society, while simultaneously
embellishing corporate profits.

This
understanding would have been equally evident in the mainstream
media’s buildup to the war had we a less propagandized, better read,
and more informed citizenry. Even the politically naïve should have
known that Saddam Hussein’s threat to the US, so vividly hyped in
the media, was pure marketing propaganda.

But
the majority of the people bought it, and now we have no choice but
to live with our purchase. Short of a major social upheaval, we are
going to be in Iraq for a very long time, and the death toll will
continue to rise, especially for the Iraqis—the unwilling recipients
of our corporate benevolence delivered through carpet bombs, terror,
and torture. For these are the undeniable legacy of our foreign
policies, and the illegal, amoral, acquisition of property by blunt
force trauma.

If we
are to survive as a republic, we must appreciate that capitalism and
its cousin, global corporatism—not Saddam Hussein, not Communism or
Socialism, nor Islamic terrorists, are the greatest threats to
democracy. Zionism and Christian fundamentalism, which attempt to
provide the flimsy moral basis for our Middle East policy, also pose
significant obstacles to world peace by denying justice to others
and promoting ethnic cleansing.

It is
beguiling that we have yet to learn this fundamental lesson, that we
know so little about our own history, and the role that mass
ignorance plays in determining the future.

The
narcotic of state sponsored propaganda has a powerful and hypnotic
effect on our collective senses, and it is rending asunder the
fabric of what is supposed to be a free and civil society. We
believe what we are told and accept what we are given, without
demanding truth, justice or accountability.

It is
imperative for the purveyors of war to maintain a cloak of secrecy
and a façade of public support where, if the truth were known, none
would exist. It is necessary to keep the truth concealed in order to
throw the public off the scent of the corruption that is the guiding
principle of corporate governance and plutocracy, fomented by
morally bankrupt men and women; a system that causes irreparable
harm and suffering to its innocent victims and then profits from the
misery and suffering it inflicts.

These
days it is popular to describe the events occurring in Iraq as the
result of incompetence, mismanagement, miscalculation, and
benevolent bungling; to characterize them as a well intentioned
mistake on the road to freedom and democracy, rather than the moral
abomination they are. What we have in Iraq is not the result of any
of these phenomena. It is the intended consequence of cold
calculation to bomb Iraq into submission, to thoroughly disorient
its people, and to apply economic shock therapy before they can
recognize what is being done to them.

The
intent is to invade sovereign nations either militarily,
economically, or both; and to force unbridled capitalism on them.
This means, of course, that we must first overthrow the existing
governments—many of them democracies, and replace them with ruthless
dictatorships willing to betray their own people, and amenable to
opening up their countries to corporate exploitation and
privatization.

So
called free market capitalism requires corrupt leadership on the
receiving end that is willing to accept bribes while becoming a
puppet to the US. This is how some of the must brutal regimes in the
world came into power. Corporate America is always beating the drums
of war in search of profits and ever increasing shares of the
world’s markets. Enough is never enough—they want it all.

Aside
from overthrowing popularly elected governments, the unspoken
objective of mature capitalism, guided by the doctrine of economic
shock therapy, is to turn once sovereign nations into totally
deregulated corporate states, answerable to no one.

This
objective will be accomplished by privatizing the nationalized
infrastructure, inviting in foreign investors, removing tariffs that
protect local business and cooperatives from predatory multinational
corporations, and downsizing the workforce; by eliminating social
spending, and removing all forms of corporate controls. In short, by
conducting a fire sale of each nation’s stolen assets and auctioning
them off at bargain basement prices to wealthy multinational
investors.

The
intent is to create an unfettered corporate state in which the
market, driven solely by profit, is the final arbiter of all things;
an Orwellian world in which human rights, labor laws, environmental
protections, and social justice do not even exist, much less enter
into market equations.

Aided
by the World Bank and the IMF, we are rapidly arriving at a state of
global corporate fascism—the free market reform of manic capitalism,
greed on steroids; a horrible economic monster unleashed upon
unsuspecting people the world over, masquerading as democracy and
free trade. And it is occurring in blatant contradiction to
everything that is free, decent, and fair; a monstrosity utterly
devoid of humanity and empathy for those struggling to survive.

But
behind the marketing façade of a beneficent capitalism that is more
oxymoronic than real, the skeleton of Reaganism, free marketry, and
trickle down economics is exposed for all to see. We are witnessing
naked greed unleashed upon the world like a swarm of locusts the
size of North America. The fabulously wealthy are realizing obscene
profits, while the majority of the world’s people are forced into
economic servitude, many of them living in abject poverty,
scratching out a bleak existence on sweatshop wages under horrendous
conditions.

Economic slavery and burdensome debt, not freedom and democracy, is
what we are imposing upon Iraq, aided by the most powerful military
in history and, all too often, with the blessings of an oblivious
and propagandized citizenry. Aside from the fierce resistance to the
occupation, the US is achieving all of its major objectives in Iraq.

Like
flies circling piles of stinking excrement, the lords of unfettered
capitalism are buzzing around the bloated corpse of what is left of
the world. And they have no intentions of stopping at Iraq. Iran and
Syria are waiting in the wings: war that will not end in our
lifetime.

If the
world were as enamored with capitalism as its adherents proclaim,
there would be no need to masquerade it as anything other than what
it is—economic self interest for the privileged, driven by
insatiable greed, funded by the public treasure. There would be no
need to impose it on the world through high tech militarism and
occupation, preceded by elaborate propagandistic media blitzes and
tricks. All people would seek it out, as they seek water to slake
their thirst and nourishment for their bodies.

So we
must ask ourselves: When has it ever been in the pubic interest to
over feed the rich and starve the poor? When has it ever been in the
public interest to destroy the earth for the sake of profits? When
has it ever been in the public interest to promote war and injustice
over peace and shared prosperity?

Just
people everywhere must resist evil or run the risk of being
complicit in it. Neutrality, indifference and apathy, are untenable
responses to what is being done in our name. Somehow, we must awaken
from this media induced cultural stupor. We must do so under the
prying eyes of government and private security contractors who are
protecting corporate investors from democracy, and from people like
us. Each of us is being diminished just as the Declaration of
Independence states: “harass our people and eat out their
substance.”

Every
citizen is faced with a simple choice: organize or perish. The storm
clouds of World War Three are looming on the horizon. These are
extraordinary times that demand something from every one of us.

Charles Sullivan is a photographer and free-lance writer living in
the hinterland of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at csullivan@phreego.com

IMAGINE
a planet-wide system built for PERPETUAL PEACE, and no longer
for PERPETUAL WAR